Make Facts Sexy Again
A suggested slogan to break the spell of conspiracy and possibly save the world
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An ally who read my Q&A with Peter Pomerantsev sent me a note that read: “Make Facts Sexy Again should be a new slogan.”
She was referencing a phrase I used in a question I asked the Russian propaganda expert about how we make facts sexy again. I had read him a quote from his book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible that brilliantly sums up how a post-truth nihilism infected Russia and proved to be contagious. Here is that quote:
“With no idea of the future left, facts become unnecessary. They are, after all, unpleasant things, reminders of one’s mortality and limitations… The process occurred in Russia harder and faster because cynicism and disillusionment set in earlier… everything turned into a dark carnival more rapidly. The Russian president turned politics into a reality show, remaking authoritarianism with the logic of twenty-first century entertainment.”—Peter Pomerantsev
I asked him how we undo what I call Reality TV Fascism.
“I just feel like there's got to be a way where we can make facts sexy again,” I said.
His response that it could be done was optimistic — America being a place of great ideas, great talent and innovation. Remaking the tech and media sector is perfectly doable, he said, it’s simply that America no longer activates “itself for grand media projects as it’s done in the past.”
“We know how to do this,” he said. “The problem in America is not that nobody knows the technology of how to do this. The problem in America is that none of this brings instant profit...”
It felt like a gut punch. That the desire for instant profit is the reason America didn’t fight the information war, but it rang ever true. Echoes of Nancy MacLean interviews where she taught me that the entire Koch cadre project was to remove anything that got in the way of capitalism, and that included democracy.
Pomerantsev continued:
“And the fact that people don't care about the truth, now that is a very interesting thing,” he said. “There's no market for it — that I think is very, very important. And we need to think about why that is.”
It’s all I’ve been thinking about since I interviewed him last Sunday with my podcast partner High Fidelity. The cold reality is there is no market for truth. Now, we can argue that you are here supporting me, because you have an appetite for truth. And I support dozens of writers because I have an appetite for truth, but as far as market share, his point is valid. All Rupert Murdoch had to do was write a billion dollar check, and he could continue his lie factory.
Surely, if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I believe Russia’s most successful export are the lies poisoning the world.
“How do we create contexts where we can agree on what facts are,” asked Pomerantsev. “That's very important for democracy, for us to be able to say, you know, like the court of law, we admit this as evidence in our debate — that is very important. That has broken down, where a conspiracy theory can be as important as a piece of scientific evidence. The fact that consensus has broken down starts to make democratic debate impossible because we can't agree on what constitutes evidence in a debate. So that's very important.”
Two more things that are haunting me since our interview — no shame in lying and giving the middle finger to reality is now deemed virtuous:
“When politicians are called out lying, no one seems to care — shame has disappeared. I think that’s a very important symptom. I don't think it's a cause. It’s a very important symptom of a certain type of society that doesn't want to confront reality, where reality has no value, and where almost purposefully giving the middle finger to reality is deemed a virtue…”—Peter Pomerantsev
I urge you read or listen to the RadPod interview with the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is NOT Propaganda.
It’s clear that reprioritizing truth is the foremost mission of any pro-democracy forces remaining.
Great thinkers have put just the right words in front of us in previous decades. Václav Havel urged us to live in truth.
As Timothy Snyder wrote in the 2018 reissue of Havel’s Power of the Powerless:
“Facing a situation that seemed unalterable in the 1970s, Havel maintained that truthful words and actions of citizens matter, and that each of us has the responsibility to be a bit more courageous than we want to be.”
—Timothy Snyder, Vienna, 24 June 2018
“It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality,” wrote Havel, of the unbroken greyness of Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule.
In a column I wrote on Havel’s work for Byline Supplement, I noted that he referred to the division between the system and the needs of the true self as a “yawning abyss.”
I wrote:
In those words, I see my own country — a land now of accepted lies and a media system that normalizes the lies. I also see a greater need to turn to independent writers and historians for a constant source of truth.
These are the people willing to ‘live within the truth’ and who are being targeted as they continue to strive to raise collective social consciousness.
Because by now, no media outlet should be portraying Elon Musk as a great man — he is nothing more than a Russian bot being detonated to destroy America and save Putin. Donald Trump has his role, just another Viktor Yanukovych doing the bidding of the Kremlin.
In 1978, when Havel writes of Czechoslovakia, he is also writing of America in the future:
“Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past, it falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.”
He explains that since the “main pillar of the system is living a lie, the fundamental threat to any dictatorial regime is living in truth”.
As he predicted the enslavement by technology, he also offered us a way out: “a radical renewal toward a moral reconstitution of society… of values like trust, openness, solidarity, and love”. He told readers that the brighter future may already be here if we are just willing to see it.
The Power of the Powerless was published illegally in Czechoslovakia and smuggled out into Poland. In 1979, Havel received a four and a half year prison sentence.
He would go on to help lead the Velvet Revolution, the non-violent movement that toppled the communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was elected as the last President of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989, and the first President of the Czech Republic. A poet, a playwright, a dissident became a President. The posters at the time read: Havel na Hrad (Havel to the Castle).
In February of 1990, in an interview with newsman Jim Lehrer for PBS, he was asked if there was something basic in all human beings that relates to freedom, even for those who never knew it.
“I think this is part of the nature of man — a desire for freedom, for a dignified life,” he responded, his eyes downcast. “Of course, man is also a weak creature with many bad qualities. The totalitarian system was masterful in how it managed to mobilize all the bad qualities.”
Lehrer asked what kind of damage that system caused to the psyche of the people and Havel responded that “the dark traces left by the era of totalitarianism in the human mind are difficult to do away with”.
Upon his death on December 18, 2011, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was born in Czechoslovakia, called her friend Václav Havel one of the great figures of the 20th century.
“He is one of the people that was able to be a part of overthrowing a dictatorial system by talking to people,” she told PBS. “He had moral stature… speaking out and having that strong moral fiber, people just knew that he told the truth to people who had only heard lies. That’s his legacy.”
As we enter a brutal era where lies are being normalized and thinking is discouraged, we have to turn to dissident voices to learn how to resist totalitarianism once again, before the future disappears.
As I wrote in that column, I believe courage can be infectious, and it’s quite necessary.
Pomerantsev believes we misdiagnosed the problem by making it about lies and disinformation. What is really happening is the crafting of stories that lead to demonizing the “other.”
“What we're really talking about is the construction of identities, political identities, which dehumanize the ‘other,’ which led to the rise of a type of discourse that makes the collaborative conversation that you need for democracy impossible, and then, because it becomes impossible, you start to look for authoritarian solutions.
“So it's a system of propaganda that leads to basically saying, ‘Well, democracy doesn't work. We need a cult-like leader.’ So I think that's the problem we've actually missed…
“And what we're dealing with, whether historically or now, is the construction of identities and stories that lead to the destruction of democracy and ultimately, terrorism, war and violence.
“And I think that's the issue. And as long as we're talking about this in terms of lies versus truth, I think we've misdiagnosed the situation. The most effective extremist propaganda doesn't even need to use lies. It creates feelings, and you can do that by taking bits of evidence that are real.”—Peter Pomerantsev on RadPod
The first time How Fascism Works author Jason Stanley came on RadPod, he explained that conspiracy theories are always found when authoritarianism is on the rise. It makes it easier to manipulate people when they no longer believe their eyes and their ears.
So how do you make people hungry for the truth?
When discerning the truth is a life or death struggle.
Famine is truth. War is truth. Disease is truth. These are undeniable truths that can’t be washed away by social media or a telegenic sadist with a microphone.
Alternately and importantly, family is truth. Health is truth. Nature is truth. Life is truth.
Why not make facts sexy again and live through this.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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I'm too sexy for their lies =]